In dazzling original poems, essays, screenplay, and libretto gathered here, the author draws on personal experience and the work of others to illuminate "decreation"--the state in which the self dissolves.

In dazzling original poems, essays, screenplay, and libretto gathered here, the author draws on personal experience and the work of others to illuminate "decreation"--the state in which the self dissolves.

"One of the most interesting gatherings of material that any poet has published within living memory." --The Economist

Simone Weil described "decreation" as "undoing the creature in us" -- an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing. "Cool, resolute, smart, and lovely.... Carson has emerged in the last two decades as a kind of prophet of the unknowable." --* The Village Voice*